Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill

Debate between Jack Straw and Caroline Lucas

Tuesday 15th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Straw]

My hon. Friend puts it much better than I did. That is the truth. We have a compressed programme and there will be complaints again about that, but the House usually rises in the middle of December, and if the Bill were to be repealed at the end of December and the House wanted proper time to consider this legislation, we would need to start on it in early November at least, which is only a few months away. I cannot see that we would be in any better position at that stage than we are now.

[Caroline Lucas]

Apart from the fact that the right hon. Gentleman cannot count his months, I make the serious point that it would make a difference in the sense that during the summer we could be having the public debate. The public care about the Bill. They could be speaking to their MPs about it. They have been left out of the process. If we started in October, we would still have three months—two and a half months—in this place to have a proper debate.

[Mr Straw]

Of course I accept that the public are concerned, but from my long experience they have a clear view of how to balance the interests of liberty and their own personal security—that is what this is about, not the security of the state—and they implicitly acknowledge that, although the systems that we have built up during the past 30 years may not be perfect, they do provide that balance. They provide a level of control over Ministers and the intelligence, security and police services, which is pretty unparalleled in most other countries.

Let us consider the abuses that take place in Europe. I think of what has happened in France in recent years, where one Minister intercepted the telephone calls of another Minister—all kinds of abuses by Ministers and the judiciary. That has never happened here and it could never happen here under our system—[Interruption.] Yes, it used to happen. It is right that trade unions were wire-tapped. Many others, thousands of people, were subject to intrusive surveillance. I know that to be the case because an officer of the Security Service told me that and showed me my file. I know that to be the case in respect of my family as well. But that was under a system where there was no statutory regulation whatsoever of telephone intercept, or data retention, which was available then, and when the very existence of the security and intelligence agencies was itself denied. That has rightly changed to take account of our duties and public concerns. It is not perfect, but we are much closer to a system that properly balances those things.

I hope that the Committee will not accept, for the reasons I have suggested, what my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East suggests, which will lead to a truncated, abbreviated review that will not work, and that instead we will have the longer review, proposed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn, and sober consideration of a new Act to replace this one and RIPA before the end of 2016.

Iraq War (10th Anniversary)

Debate between Jack Straw and Caroline Lucas

Thursday 13th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

I am particularly grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention because I will shortly pay tribute to those hon. Members who did stand up in this place, who did scrutinise and who did ask the right questions. The fact that they came to the conclusions that they did demonstrates that the evidence was there. Unfortunately, there was a will not to look at some of it.

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

Before the hon. Lady goes on, may I say in respect of Mr Hans Blix—I have made this point outside the House—that there is a profound disconnection between what he is saying now and what he said at the time? What he said at the time, and he repeated it in a book in 2004, was that he thought that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat. I know of no provenance whatsoever for the claim that the inspectors were prevented from continuing their work in Iraq by either the US or the UK in January 2003.

Moreover, the final reports from Hans Blix complained about a lack of co-operation, the inability of inspectors to interview scientists from Iraq inside or outside Iraq, and the continuing intimidation. The final report that he made, which I had to force him to publish, on 7 March 2003, catalogued in 29 chapters of 170 pages the unanswered questions that Mr Blix thought Saddam had to answer, even at that stage, about all the chemical and biological weaponry that had been known about in the past and which Saddam had failed to explain. That is where Blix was at the time. My last point is this—

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas]

Well, I have seen the evidence from Chirac and the way it was treated when it came to the Chilcot inquiry, and I think that it is perfectly plain that Chirac’s intervention was deliberate misinterpreted. The words were taken in the wrong order and made to mean something different. [Interruption.] We can trade our beliefs across the Chamber, but the bottom line is that there was evidence out there that would have led Members to suspect that what they were being told at that point was not necessarily the case.

[Mr Straw]

First, the transcript, and indeed the video, were available to all Members on both sides of the House, so they could make their own judgments on it, and the vast majority made the judgment that we made about what had happened. Secondly, what we were seeking in the second UN resolution was not war, but peace—I was desperate for it—by an ultimatum that included six tests, which were drafted by Hans Blix, by the way, and they were tests that Saddam could easily have passed had he wished to do so.